Organizations, such as corporations and governmental entities, often are comprised of many users and user groups. These users and user groups may be spread over large physical spaces, or geographic areas, such as in different buildings in the same city, different cities in the same country or region, and even in different countries. Moreover, such users and user groups may also be separated by subject matter, such as different departments in the same or different facilities. The systems, hardware, and software utilized by the different users groups and users to communicate internally and externally may also vary widely from group to group, raising compatibility issues.
Practicing communication governance over such dispersed user groups can be difficult. Many considerations contribute to a comprehensive communications policy, including risk management, compliance with organizational norms, human resources considerations, security issues, regulatory issues, operational policies, and best practices guidelines, to name a few. Moreover, each geographically distinct and/or subject matter distinct group typically operates its own rules system separate from the other groups. Moreover, each distinct group may be governed by different a communication policy implemented by a different set of communication rules forming part of a rules system. Thus, each user group often follows a different communication policy and rules system, without knowledge of the communication policy and rules system of other groups within the organization. As these disparate policies interact with one another, communication rules that once worked well within a small organization may lead to incorrect and even absurd results when applied together.
These conventional systems are effective at enforcing communication policies within a user group of the organization, but are often redundant, wasteful of resources, and may be contradictory when applied together over larger and larger user groups. Moreover, the addition, deletion, and modification of rules may be straightforward with a relatively small set of rules, but with many rules to enforce, the addition of a single rule, coupled with its interaction (e.g., chaining) with other rules may readily lead to unintended prohibitions and allowances of communications. In addition, understanding the impact of changes to the rules system is difficult to predict without simply bringing the changes online and monitoring results in an ad hoc manner. Therefore, a way to easily review the effectiveness of a rules system in implementing a communication policy, suggest modifications to the rules system to better implement the communications policy, and test proposed changes to the rules system would be useful.